A few months ago we released new Video Commands into the Bot Bank. Well, now they have a companion: Audio Commands!

As we mentioned then, online video content is now more important than ever. In a recent poll, 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the second most important form of content for their business. The only item on the list that was more important in the survey was blogging, and it came in just one percent higher at 38%.

What makes your video even better? Great audio! And of course, you can use audio entirely on its own, and these new commands make it easy to, for example, put together a bot that turns your written content directly into audio, with the new speech to text command.

How might you use these new audio commands?

Turn your old blog posts into videos without “saying” a word. Use the new video commands to make videos out of a few relevant images, and narrate them with the SaveTexttoSpeechAudio.

Combine the narration with music to make it more interesting using the
adjustAudioVolume and superimposeAudio commands.

Take the audio out of old videos that you’ve made, superimpose music onto the audio, and turn it into podcasts. You can even set album art for your mp3 files so they upload directly to a platform like Soundcloud in a nice, neat format.

Take a look at this simple example. I think the new SaveTexttoSpeechAudio command is going to be a popular one. I used it to create the wav file at the top of this page. It works exactly like you’d expect:

You can also drop a variable into that textbox, so it could more cleanly narrate an entire page of text if you’d like, or whatever you’ve entered into the variable.

I’m going to add this wav to the video I’d created before, which I’d added music to.

Did you know that even young adults use UBot Studio? We’ve always said it’s simple enough for children, but powerful enough for programmers, and we’ve actually heard stories of both: programmers who use it to quickly build incredible automation applications, and customers who buy UBot Studio for their teenagers to use (some of those teenagers have even had successful product launches).

UBot Studio’s diverse user base always make us proud, even though we don’t talk about it much. But this is a story we wanted to share with everyone.

A few years ago we began working with a primary school in Belgium, which uses UBot Studio once a week in a class with students between 12 and 14 years old. UBot Studio is first used on a projector in the classroom to show how you can easily make software to automate processes, and to explain how to understand the structure of web pages. And at a more basic level, it helps the students understand logic.

An image from the school’s brochure

They start with scripts that have been prebuilt, with explanations of why they work: “We provide them with simple scripts like scraping a field and filling it with content. Explaining these scripts helps them to create their own scripts.”

Then, they use the drag-and-drop GUI to build their own scripts. Using UBot Studio helps them both understand the functionality of the backend of the website, as well as how an automation tool interacts with it. Or as a school associate told us, it “gives the students the opportunity to program their DOM structures and understand it in another way by ‘using’ the DOM structure.” The DOM – for those of you who don’t know – is the logical structure of a document (like a webpage). It’s like how the computer “understands” the webpage, and it stands for Document Object Model. When you click on an element inside UBot Studio, in the background, UBot Studio is referencing it based on how it’s described in the DOM. (See more info here.)

And ultimately, it helps the kids learn to program:

By programming website projects they have to automate their form subscriptions, get external data from other websites (intranet) and place it into their web application…[this makes] the students think abstractly… knowing the outcome of their actions before they start. Automation is the perfect way to think that way because you have a goal to reach from the start without knowing how to get it done.

UBot Studio “let the students see why DOM structures are very important in online development, learning to work and interpret the structure and what you can do with it by automating things with UBot Studio.”

By the end, they learn a lot about website backends, and more than a little bit about how to program. And if you’ve ever played with Legos, you will appreciate this. We asked if the kids really understand that they’re programming as they’re building scripts with UBot Studio:

They don’t realize they are programming. We explain UBot as a box of Legos. Each piece has it’s function in the program to achieve their goal. Chaining is key for combining functionalities – so they learn logical thinking along the way.

Online video content is now more important than ever. In a recent poll, 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the second most important form of content for their business. The only item on the list that was more important in the survey was blogging, and it came in just one percent higher at 38%.

We’ve thought about video automation to UBot Studio for some time now, after trying our hand at video marketing and some other related fun stuff over the years.

Now, it’s finally here, with commands that let you do everything from combining images into videos, flipping videos upside down and changing the volume and speed, to creating gifs, snapshots, and audio files directly from videos.

The ability to quickly add video marketing into your automation opens up some incredible options. If you haven’t used video in your marketing yet, it’s easy to start! Cameras and video equipment are cheaper than ever and even the quality of video you can take with a smartphone is high. Here are a few example ideas you could do with the new UBot Studio video features:

Easily record a video every day (a “vlog”) in just a few minutes with your phone and set up a uBot that, when run, adds music and an intro to the video and uploads it to Youtube, Facebook, etc.

Record an “interview” with a friend about your business.

Record a video “review” or “testimonial” about a product you love (UBot Studio comes to mind…), proving how much of an automation and marketing expert you are.

Record a “behind-the-scenes” or “culture” video of how your business works, giving your customers some insight into your day-to-day operations

If you don’t feel like being on camera, you can just as easily download a screen recording tool and make tutorials as well. Screencast is one option, and it’s free.

Or, if you’re comfortable talking but not quite ready to use video, you can use the new features to turn an audio recording combined with a single image or a collection of images into a video.

Ready to add video marketing into your life yet?

Let’s get started with a quick intro to how these cool new commands work.

Open up the Bot Bank.

On the left, you’ll see the big list of new video features if you’re a subscribed customer.

Most commands take just a few simple parameters. Most common are the file location you’re starting with (“Input File Location”) and the file you want to end up with (“Output Video File”).

Other parameters might include time (HH:MM format), seconds (a standard numeral), or other image or audio files.

A few additional things to note:

While many commands work with a wide variety of formats, such as .avi, .mpg, and .mp4, you should be aware that some video commands only work with specific file types. If you experience any errors, this is an important thing to remember!

Also, make sure to expand the ‘advanced’ tab for commands, as there are sometimes additional options there like the number of seconds or time you’d like something to start at.

Now, let’s go through a few example commands in a scenario that most of us can use:

Maybe you’ve got a video that you uploaded a few years ago and you’d like to add an intro and re-upload it, so it’s fresher. This is an easy thing to do with all your videos – all you need is a single audio file, an image, and the URLs of the videos on youtube. Simple.

I’ve recorded an audio intro (2017_intro.mp3). Now, I’m going to create a new single image video to put at the beginning. You could use a simple all-black image file if you don’t want to add any new information, but in this case, I’m going to use this 2017 image:

I’ll just drop the commands in like this:

create single image video with audio("C:\\Users\\Administrator\\Downloads\\Video\\2017.png","C:\\Users\\Administrator\\Downloads\\Video\\Intro.mp3","C:\\Users\\Administrator\\Downloads\\Video\\Intro_Video.mp4")

Now, the video I get out of it, “Intro_Video.mp4”, is ready for viewing:

Now I’ll download my old video directly from youtube with the download from youtube command.

This new playground includes over dozen whole sites inside it that mimic some very well known social media networks and other common types of sites like classifieds and wikis. Make accounts, make posts, scrape data – anything your heart desires. You won’t hurt anyone’s feelings, because every night at midnight all the data will be refreshed.

Have fun with these, seriously. It was a lot of fun to create them and I hope you enjoy testing the limits of what you can do. I’m eager to hear your feedback on how to make them even better.